Wednesday, April 30, 2008

A variety of current and former high-level officials have recently warned that the Bush administration is attempting to instill a dictatorship in America, and will itself carry out a fake terrorist attack in order to obtain one.

Background

FBI agents, Time Magazine, Keith Olbermann and The Washington Post and Rolling Stone have all stated that the administration has issued terror alerts based on scant intelligence in order to rally people around the flag when the administration was suffering in the polls. This implies — as an initial matter only — that the administration will play fast and loose with the facts in order to instill fear for political purposes

The former assistant secretary of treasury in the Reagan administration, called the "Father of Reaganomics", who is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service, and, said:

"Ask yourself: Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging "terrorist" attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda?" He goes on to say:

If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the "unitary executive" at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush's declaration of "national emergency" and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance.

A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconsevatives' Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel's complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel.

Think about it. If another 9/11-type "security failure" were not in the works, why would Homeland Security czar Chertoff go to the trouble of convincing the Chicago Tribune that Americans have become complacent about terrorist threats and that he has "a gut feeling" that America will soon be hit hard?

Many of these people did not have any useful information. And since the U.S. military stressed quantity over quality (not actually demanding hard intelligence or probable cause to suspect that someone was a bad guy), this did not constitute a useful intelligence-gathering exercise, but simply horrific punishment.

Indeed, some of the people tortured as part of the "war on terror" were literally crazy, and no amount of interrogation or torture would generate any useful intelligence.

Retired FBI agent Daniel Coleman, who led an examination of documents after Abu Zubaida's capture in early 2002 and worked on the case, said the CIA's harsh tactics cast doubt on the credibility of Abu Zubaida's information.

"I don't have confidence in anything he says, because once you go down that road, everything you say is tainted," Coleman said, referring to the harsh measures. "He was talking before they did that to him, but they didn't believe him. The problem is they didn't realize he didn't know all that much."

***

"They said, 'You've got to be kidding me,' " said Coleman, recalling accounts from FBI employees who were there. " 'This guy's a Muslim. That's not going to win his confidence. Are you trying to get information out of him or just belittle him?'" Coleman helped lead the bureau's efforts against Osama bin Laden for a decade, ending in 2004.

Coleman goes on to say:

Abu Zubaida ... was a "safehouse keeper" with mental problems who claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did.

***Looking at other evidence, including a serious head injury that Abu Zubaida had suffered years earlier, Coleman and others at the FBI believed that he had severe mental problemsthat called his credibility into question. "They all knew he was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone," Coleman said, referring to al-Qaeda operatives. "You think they're going to tell him anything?"

The article also says that Abu Zubaida might have been tortured for months.

(Indeed, even prisoners who were not previously crazy ended up that way after being severely tortured.)

Sorry, Mr. Scalia. Torture is not a valid information-gathering technique. It is, in fact, the cruelest and most unusual punishment there is.

Monday, April 28, 2008

In order to avoid real protest against an unnecessary war, the Neocons decided that they had to avoid a draft at all costs, because a draft would cause Americans to actually pay attention to what is going on. In other words, the Neocons couldn't have gotten away with such a crazy war if Americans were getting drafted (they learned that lesson from the Vietnam war)

So the government has instead had to pay tremendous sums to mercenaries from Blackwater and elsewhere

In response to the numerous reports of molten metal under ground zero, defenders of the official version of 9/11 have tried to argue that it was not steel, but some other kind of metal with a lower melting point.

Well, here are what top experts who eyewitnessed the molten metal say:

According to reporter Christopher Bollyn, Mark Loizeaux, president the world's top demolition company, and Peter Tully, head of a large construction firm, said the following:

Tully told AFP that he had seen pools of “literally molten steel” in the rubble.

Loizeaux confirmed this: “Yes, hot spots of molten steel in the basements,” he said, “at the bottom of the elevator shafts of the main towers, down seven levels.”

The molten steel was found “three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed,” he said. He confirmed that molten steel was also found at WTC 7, which mysteriously collapsed in the late afternoon.

Indeed, the military had actually drilled for aerial attacks with planes.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the military air defense agency responsible for protecting the U.S. mainland, had run drills for several years of planes being used as weapons against the World Trade Center and other U.S. high-profile buildings, and "numerous types of civilian and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked aircraft". In other words, drills using REAL AIRCRAFT simulating terrorist attacks crashing jets into buildings, including the twin towers, were run.

Former Federal Prosecutor, Office of Special Investigations, U.S. Department of Justice under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan; former U.S. Army Intelligence officer, and currently a widely-sought media commentator on terrorism and intelligence services (John Loftus) says "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defense of incompetence".

Anyone who violates the Geneva Convention by engaging in murder, torture, or inhuman treatment is guilty of a crime under U.S. law.

Specifically, the War Crimes Act of 1996, a federal statute set forth at 18 U.S.C. § 2441, makes it a federal crime for any U.S. national, whether military or civilian, to violate the Geneva Convention

18 U.S.C. § 2441 has no statute of limitations, which means that a war crimes complaint can be filed at any time. The penalty may be life imprisonment or -- if a single prisoner dies due to torture -- death. Since the U.S. military has admitted that they have tortured some prisoners to death, that means that Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Powell, Tenet, Rice, and Yoo could all be sentenced to life in prison, or even death.

Additionally, violation of the war crimes act almost certainly constitutes a "high crime or misdemeanor" which would allow impeachment of such officials.

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